


Insomnia

by redbuttonhole



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Asexual Sherlock, Insomnia, M/M, Midnight Conversations, Possibly some future cuddling, Sharing a Bed, Sherlock Can't Sleep, platonic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-11-18
Updated: 2014-11-21
Packaged: 2018-02-26 03:57:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,901
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2637104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redbuttonhole/pseuds/redbuttonhole
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock can't sleep.  John is annoyed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

"John, wake up."

The familiar voice pierced through John's dream and dispersed the fog of sleep in an instant. Long years in hospitals and war zones had trained him to respond to crises without hesitation – fine preparation for life with Sherlock.

"Case?" he said simply, swinging his legs over the edge of the bed and feeling around for yesterday's trousers.

"No," said Sherlock.

John paused and looked up at Sherlock for the first time since waking. The room was still dark, but Sherlock's pale form was dimly visible in the glow from the window. He was wearing his old pyjamas and the blue dressing gown.

"Emergency?" said John.

Sherlock lifted an eyebrow, considering this.

"Possibly," he said. "For me, yes."

"Are you ill?"

Again, Sherlock hesitated.

"In a manner of speaking."

John sighed. Not hospitals or war, but two years of living with the consulting detective had trained him to anticipate what was probably coming next.

"The nature of the emergency...?"

"I'm bored."

Sherlock at least had the decency to look a bit sheepish. John swiveled around on the bed and slid back under the covers.

"No, John, don't go back to sleep. Come on, you're up now anyway."

"I am very good at going back to sleep. You might call it an area of expertise." He smoothed the pillow and settled back into its welcoming divot. True to his word, not more than twenty seconds passed before unconsciousness started to claim him again. Something, however, kept him hovering at the edge. "Are you going to stand there all night?" he said into the pillow. "It's a bit creepy."

John felt movement behind him, and then a depression at the foot of the bed. Sherlock had sat down.

"You were meant to leave," said John.

"Be reasonable," said Sherlock. "I can't go back downstairs. You have no idea how boring it is down there."

"You really think that sitting there while I sleep is going to be more interesting?"

"Vastly."

John lifted his head from the pillow and looked down the bed at Sherlock, but he did not appear to be joking. "That bad?" he said.

"Worse. It's this or burn down half of London."

John set his head back down.

"So you just want to sit there?"

"No, I want you to get up. But if you insist on sleeping, I'm willing to accept this as a compromise."

"Watching me sleep."

"Yes."

John considered this.

"Is it... an experiment?"

Sherlock didn't answer right away.

"Sherlock?"

"Which answer will make you more likely to let me stay?"

"Here's a thought," said John.   "Why don't you just tell the truth instead of trying to manipulate me?"

The silent sound of Sherlock's hesitation again filled the room.

"Yes or no, Sherlock. It's not complicated."

"Oh, but it is," replied Sherlock in his soothing baritone. "The question raises any number of philosophical concerns... What is the nature of an experiment? Can't the whole of life, in some ways, be considered one long experiment? Is it possible to be conducting an experiment without knowing it? Is it, on the other hand, possible to think one is conducting an experiment, but in fact, not be conducting an experiment at all? How do we measure the difference between experiment and not experiment?"

"Oh, for fuck's sake," growled John. "I'm not staying up all night discussing ontology with you."

"What would you prefer to discuss?"

"Nothing! Look, can't you just lie down and at least try to sleep?"

"Can I stay here?"

John didn't answer. It seemed like setting a bad precedent, on the one hand. Given Sherlock's regular bouts of insomnia, if John allowed this once, he might never get Sherlock out of his bed. On the other hand, he was very sleepy, and anything that would get the other man to shut up for a while would be a welcome development.

"John?" Sherlock prompted.

"Fine, yes, all right," he gritted. "As long as you're quiet."

His felt the depression shift as Sherlock crawled up the bed and extended his long limbs on the other half of the bed. John cracked an eye to see Sherlock lying flat on his back, his eyes open toward the ceiling, his hands clasped over his chest like a corpse. A bit weird, no question, but then, when was life with Sherlock anything but weird?

John closed his eye and, with a little sigh of surrender, allowed sleep to claim him again.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Another late night conversation between Sherlock and John. John learns some surprising details about Sherlock's earlier attempts to deal with his insomnia.

John awoke with a start. His pulse was racing, but he couldn't get a fix on what had alarmed him: was it something from his dream, or an unexpected shift in his environment? The first light of dawn was faintly visible through his window, and he could make out some rumbling early morning traffic from a nearby thoroughfare, but everything in the flat seemed quiet and calm.

Was it another nightmare, then? John closed his eyes and grasped at the remaining tendrils of the dream. It didn't feel like a nightmare, from what he could remember... something about an ex-girlfriend, or maybe two exes sort of muddled together. She/they had seemed quite happy to see him, and...

No, _definitely_ not a nightmare. John sighed and burrowed deeper under the covers, prodding his unconscious to reconstruct the dream and take it to its logical conclusion. The girl in his dream was very pretty, and very willing, and she smelled...

Something a little odd about how she smelled, actually. Not bad, but strangely... masculine. And familiar. A very familiar, masculine scent that John was not used to smelling in his bedroom. John's eyes opened and he sat straight up. Sure enough, a pyjama-clad consulting detective was lying on the other half of the bed, under the covers this time.

"Finally!" exclaimed Sherlock. "You've been asleep for _ages_ , I don't know how you can stand it."

"Sherlock," said John, fighting to keep his tone even, "what are you doing in my bed?"

Sherlock looked affronted. "You said I could stay."

"That was two weeks ago! I said you could stay that night, not that you could pop in whenever you wanted."

"You should have been more specific," said Sherlock, his expression on the edge of a pout.

"Fine," said John. "How's this for specific? Get the hell out of my room, and stay out."

"No, don't – " began Sherlock, his eyes wide with what looked like panic. He took a breath. "I mean, please, John. Let me stay. Just for a bit?"

John had been prepared for a stubborn refusal accompanied by an epic sulk, but he was surprised at the note of desperation in Sherlock's voice.

"Sherlock," John tried, more gently now, "why don't you want to go downstairs?"

"I told you," he mumbled, his eyes downcast, "it's boring."

"What about your experiments? Or re-organizing your old files, I've seen you get immersed in that for hours at a time. Or you know, you could always try sleeping, like a normal human."

Sherlock sighed.

"I can't sleep for more than an couple of hours at a stretch, and lying awake in my bed drives me mad. Experiments and cold cases will do to distract me for a while, but around four or five, just before daybreak, I get..."

"Yes?"

"Bored. Really bored." John opened his mouth to object to this excuse, but Sherlock cut him off. "I know that sounds silly to you. You think I should be able to survive a couple of hours with nothing much to do, but you don't understand.   It isn't like ordinary daytime boredom. When everything is still and silent, and everyone is gone asleep, it's... different. All the horrible thoughts that I can usually keep at bay come rushing in to fill the vacuum. I know it's irrational, but sometimes it feels like I'm the last person left on earth, that everyone else will keep sleeping forever and leave me all on my own. I can't stand it."

Sherlock spoke quickly and softly, and sometime in the course of this little speech, he had drawn his knees up to his chin so that he was curled into a tight little ball. John had never seen him look so vulnerable, and the sight made his heart ache a little. He reached out a hand and rather awkwardly rubbed Sherlock's shoulder.

"All right," he said soothingly. "It's okay, I'm not angry. But you can't keep doing this. I know you had a whole adult life before you even met me. What did you do at night back then?"

Sherlock relaxed a bit, his body no longer so tightly coiled.

"Heroin," he said. "Or morphine or opium, depending on how bad things got, and what was available."

"Jesus," breathed John.

"What?" said Sherlock. "It helped me sleep."

"Yeah, I bet it did. No messing about with warm milk or chamomile for Sherlock bloody Holmes, eh? You went straight for the good stuff."

Sherlock shot a glare at him, as if affronted at the very idea that his body would succumb to such lesser soporifics.  

"Well, all right," said John. "That's not an option. No shooting up at night. What else?"

"Solving crimes. But that only works if there are any, and they're interesting."

"Okay. What else?"

"Sex."

John was struck speechless for a moment.

"Really?" he said at last.

"Yes, really," said Sherlock with palpable irritation, "but please don't make me go back to that. It was so _tedious_."

John couldn't help a surprised laugh.

"Tedious?" he said. "Sex? Then why did you do it?"

"Because," said Sherlock, "there aren't many activities normal people do in the middle of the night. Drugs are one. Sex is another. Then there are night workers – janitors and street sweepers and the like. Sex was slightly less tedious than that."

"Who did you have sex with?"

Sherlock shrugged.

"You won't tell me?"

"I'd tell you if I knew. Anyone. Everyone. Whoever."

"Jesus Christ."

"No, only living people. Although I suppose that's another thing people do at night – rob graves." Sherlock sat up. "John, you're a genius."

"Ugh," said John with a shudder. "No, let's take that off the table right now. You are not going to deal with your insomnia by defiling corpses. Anything else?"

"Crimes."

"You already said solving crimes."

"I mean committing them. When there weren't any to solve."

John gawped.

"You actually committed crimes, Sherlock?"

"How is that shocking? You already know I used heroin, and that's a crime."

"Yes, all right, but... What are we talking about, here? Just drug related, or...?"

"Mostly breaking and entering. Locks are diverting. Sometimes I'd help myself to little mementos."

"I believe we call that burglary."

Sherlock shrugged again.

"Semantics."

John rubbed his eyes.

"None of these are very good options," he said.

"I know that," Sherlock groused. "That's why I stopped doing them. But I still –"

"—Need something to help you through the night. Or someone."

"I don't like being alone. To be perfectly honest, it's why I went looking for a flat mate in the first place. Just hearing someone else's breathing..."

"What?"

"It's soothing."

John lay back in the bed, shoulder to shoulder with his flat mate.

"Oh, Sherlock," he said. "What are we going to do with you?"

"Just let me stay," said Sherlock in a small voice. "It's not so terrible having me here, is it?"

John didn't answer. But he didn't kick Sherlock out, either.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize, this story is pretty low on action and will probably stay that way. I hope anyone out there enjoys John and Sherlock bickering fondly and making hushed late night revelations. I dig that sort of thing.
> 
> If we're building to anything, it will probably be a big dramatic cuddle. which is to say, not very dramatic at all. but cuddly!

**Author's Note:**

> There might be more of this, if I feel like it, and there seems to be interest. 
> 
> At some point I mentioned somewhere that I would happily read an 80,000 word story which consisted of nothing but John and Sherlock cuddling in various positions. It's possible this could turn into that story.
> 
> I might also add a few scenes of Sherlock annoying other characters in the middle of the night, when John gets too fed up with him. 
> 
> Don't expect any plot! Just a lot of late night conversation and maybe platonic cuddles.
> 
> Comment if you'd like more.


End file.
